Probably the most useful thing to know about the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) is that it is an international standard. If you travel in Europe and many other parts of the world, GSM is the only type of cellular service available. Originally, the acronym GSM stood for Groupe Spécial Mobile, a group formed by the Conference of European Posts and Telegraphs (CEPT) in 1982 to research the merits of a European standard for mobile telecommunications. Commercial service using the GSM system did not actually start until 1991. Instead of using analog service, GSM was developed as a digital system using TDMA technology.

Using TDMA, a narrow band that is 30 kHz wide and 6.7 milliseconds long is split time-wise into three time slots. Narrow band means channels in the traditional sense. Each conversation gets the radio for one-third of the time. This is possible because voice data that has been converted to digital information is compressed so that it takes up significantly less transmission space. Therefore, TDMA has three times the capacity of an analogue system using the same number of channels.

Daniel Lamberti – Brand Manager: Samsung Mobile